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About MEL

The Music Experience Lab was created in 2008 by Richard Randall at Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on human auditory cognition. In 2011, Randall partnered with scholar Richard Purcell and CMU's Center for the Arts in Society to form the Listening Spaces Project —-a three-year initiative to examine how technological, political, and economic forces influence how we make music in the 21st century. The work of Listening Spaces prompted MEL to develop research programs around public music events, music as a good, and music labor/value relationships. Currently, we work with Romani musicians in the Balkans to promote Romani as important cultural producers and combat human rights abuses.

People

Rich Randall, Principal Investigator

I am a person in the world who spends part of my time answering fundamental questions about music and the human condition. I call this work the "Music Experience Lab," and I partner with people, institutions, and technologies to create new knowledge and transformational practices around music. I am currently based in Pittsburgh, PA, and employed by Carnegie Mellon University.


Cami Streuly, Research Assistant

Global Sustainability Goals

MEL projects support the following CMU Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being
Quality Education
Gender Equality
Decent Work and Economic Growth
Reduced Inequalities
Sustainable Cities and Communities

The Music Experience Lab

The Music Experience Lab (MEL) explores, creates, and documents musical experiences across multiple domains. MEL operates within and beyond disciplinary boundaries to answer questions about what music is and why it is important to us. We are musicians, artists, scholars, and activists who understand music as a rhizomatic process of listening, performing, and providing. These processes serve as lenses through which we can create, document, and interpret. We design and implement complex multi-year research projects resulting in concrete deliverables such as publications, recordings, grants, public events, concerts, conferences, and music festivals.

LISTENING

Listening is the perceptual foundation for the complex social activity we call music. Listening also describes empathetic intercultural engagements, persistent digital surveillance, machine learning, and even neuroimaging techniques. "Who listens and what do they hear?" are research questions that require multiple modes of inquiry to answer. This area organizes MEL's work in psychology, technology, and cultural and media studies into three themes: Perceptual Listening, Cultural Listening, and Machine Listening. The most recent work is listed first.

PERCEPTUAL LISTENING

2023 Gurariy, G., R. Randall and A. S. Greenberg. Neuroimaging Evidence for the Direct Role of Auditory Scene Analysis in Object Perception. Cerebral Cortex, 33(10), 6257-6272. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhac501

2021 Gurariy, G., R. Randall and A. S. Greenberg. Manipulation of Low-level Features Modulates Grouping Strength of Auditory Objects. Psychological Research, 85(6), 2256-2270. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01391-4

2016 Randall, R. and A. S. Greenberg. Principal Components Analysis of the Perception of Musicality in Pitch Sequences. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, 112-118. https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/7121654.v1

2012 Randall, R, G. Sudre, Y. Xu, A. B. Bagic. Effects of Short-Term Experience on Music-Related ERAN Responses. In (Eds) E. Cambouropoulos, C. Tsourgas, P. Mavromatis, C. Pastiadis. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition and European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, 839-840.

CULTURAL LISTENING

Romani Drummers Project

This project documents, preserves, and celebrates the rich tradition of zurla and tapan performance in North Macedonia. The study examines the significance of zurla and tapan in the daily lives of Romani musicians. It draws attention to the ever-evolving musical landscape, where genres like tallava have become integral to Romani celebrations. This project seeks to develop positive Romani representations by promoting their heritage as the traditional performers of these instruments.

Below are interviews with three Romani musicians discussing their history and connection to this tradition. The full video of the festival can be found in the Providing section.

ABDI SULJUMANOV

Zurladjia from Stumica

SUARES SALI

Tapanjia from Veles

SAMIR KURTOV

Zurladjia from Petrich

2016 Purcell, R. and R. Randall, Eds. 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan (Basingstoke, UK)

2013 Randall, R. Torture and Punishment Through Music. In J. Edmondson. Music in American Life. (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood).

MACHINE LISTENING

2022 McNeal, N. J. Huang, A. Umoren, S. Dai, R. Dannenberg, R. Randall, and T.S. Lee. Relating Human Perception of Musicality to Prediction in a Predictive Coding Model. arXiv preprint ar-Xiv:2210.16587

2017 Randall, R. Musical Affordance and the MP3. Boundary 2, 44(2), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-3826654

2016 Randall, R. and I-T. Liu. Predicting Missing Music Components with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 17th International Society on Music Information Retrieval Conference, 225-231.

2016 Randall, R. A Case for Musical Privacy. In (Eds.) R. Purcell and R. Randall. 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces (pp. 120-133). Palgrave Macmillan.

PERFORMING

Performing is the act of creating musical experiences for ourselves and others. Performing music for others is how musical culture is made. The context of performance (why, where, for whom?) is as crucial to this process as the sounds made by musicians. MEL uses performance to promote music as a social practice that embodies connection and storytelling.

Bombici

Formed in 2017, Bombici is an experimental electroacoustic collective that explores form and improvisation through Western and non-Western musical practices. They have performed in various configurations in concert halls, radical music festivals, punk bars, and on street corners. Bombici are pioneers of real-time live sound processing to create powerful augmented musical realities. Inspired by artists like Sun Ra, J Dilla, and Glenn Branca, Bombici forges a path into new sonic frontiers. Bombici founder Rich Randall works closely with Romani musicians in the US and Macedonia. Bombici’s music is an evolving conversation with Roma about their cultural capital amidst constant oppression.

Their forthcoming album, "Live at Studio B" (Adhyaropa Records, November 2024), was recorded in July 2023 at WQED in Pittsburgh, PA, with real-time audio processing on all instruments and video recorded with 14 cameras.

Young Musicians Collaborative

The Young Musicians Collaborative (YMC) was an in-school educational program developed and directed by Rich Randall from 2015 to 2016. The program served students at the Pittsburgh Public Milliones 6-12 School in the Hill District neighborhood. The goals of the Young Musicians Collaborative were to offer music-centered, connected learning opportunities for the young people of underserved neighborhoods in Pittsburgh and to expand their involvement in public and civic activities and spaces.

Specifically, the educational goals of the YMC were:
1) Enhance Personal Growth: development of self, increased confidence, and empowerment,
2) Develop Group Skills: team building and peer-based learning, and
3) Stimulate Community Engagement: experiencing the role of music in social engagement, relationship building, network creation, and community investment.

The YMC achieved these goals by connecting youth participants with established music practitioners and facilitating a series of workshops (both inside and outside the classroom) that educated and empowered. We demonstrated the connection between music performance and everyday issues, encouraging participants to investigate what matters to them and how to express that when performing. This project received financial support from the Fine Foundation (2015) and the Sprout Fund (2016).

PROVIDING

Providing the means of production guides listening and performing toward social outcomes. This is one of the most influential aspects of musical labor as it determines who can be heard and who is allowed to hear them. The good produced by musical labor is the experience and the social affordances it engenders. MEL has explored this idea on multiple scales—from public music festivals drawing thousands of participants to educational programs promoting public performance. MEL is committed to providing music as both a public good and a means of personal expression. Below are descriptions of MEL projects in this area.

Meeting of the Zurladji

Organized in the village of Ratevo in the Malesevski region of North Macedonia in 2022, The Meeting of the Zurladji celebrated the rich tradition of zurla and tapan music and the Romani families that perform it.

Pittonkatonk

Pittonkatonk was created in 2014 from a dialogue on how musical labor and music as a commodity shape social relationships and music practices in capitalist society. By promoting music as a social practice that brings people together to develop positive individual and social identities, Pittonkatonk created spaces around Pittsburgh where the audience and musicians achieve important collective identities, celebrate diversity, and collaboratively work for common goals.

Pittonkatonk was made possible through non-profit grants, donations, and volunteerism, and in each of these four years, the project was fiscally solvent. There was no admission fee, no corporate sponsors, and nothing was for sale.

It was a potluck event where people brought food, drink, music, dancing, and the desire to come together to celebrate what music and community really can be. For four years (2014-2017), Pittonkatonk successfully resisted commercialization and created a transgressive space of musical and political action.

During this time, attendance at the May Day event grew from around one hundred to a few thousand participants. We connected people with national and local musicians, activists, and educators to empower them to use their love of music to engage the world around them. You can read about what Pittonkatonk was about and what we accomplished in:

2020 Randall, R. “Pittonkatonk and Valuing Music as a Public Good.” In (Eds.) R. Garafolo, E. Allen, A. Snyder. HONK!: Mapping a Street Band Renaissance (pp. 199-211). Rutledge.

Balkan Music and Culture: Sounds of Past and Present

In 2018, we organized a symposium to discuss how ethnic, gender, class, and national identities intersect to create dynamic musical practices in the Balkans. Featured speakers include Slovenian ethnomusicologist Ana Hofman, anthropologist and dance leader Alex Marković, Macedonian Rom choreographer Milo Destanovski, and clarinetist Jessica Ruiz. The program continued with KAFANA PGH, a Balkan dance party at Los Sabrosos Dance Co in Garfield with the Pitt Carpathian Ensemble. Performances featured traditional Macedonian Zurla/Tapan music, Balkan dances, and electroacoustic sounds by the local ensemble Bombici. Attendees were invited to join in improvisations and singalongs and even bring an instrument.

Music and Labor Roundtable

The 2014 and 2017 Music and Labor Public Roundtables were organized to discuss a number of issues: being a working musician, how music has been used in labor movements, the roles race and economy play in how musical communities survive, the past and present traditions of making music, D.I.Y practices, and how technology can help or hurt musicians. All were discussed from the perspective of being in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We aimed to create solidarity and understanding about how we do the work we do. The panel of local musicians and activists engaged with audience participants to understand the material conditions in which music-making can occur, the work involved in making music, and the market value of that work.